10 TV shows that were off the air longer than 'Mad Men'

When "Mad Men" returns to AMC on Sunday, March 25 at 9 p.m., it will be the first new episode featuring Don Draper and friends in 17 months. A protracted contract negotiation with series creator Matthew Weiner, coupled with AMC's other scheduling needs, have kept the show off the air for nearly a year and a half. But that's not even close to the biggest gap between new episodes for a TV series. Some of the shows that follow returned from cancellation, while others just worked on an idiosyncratic schedule, but all stayed away for longer than the employes of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

That would be a good one to have included, yes. It was off the air for so long because HBO wasn't sure whether the show should continue or not, especially since Simon had seemingly wrapped up so many storylines at the end of season 3.

Can we really count it as a hiatus if the show in question was cancelled? Or if it comes back in a new form (like DOCTOR WHO) with a new cast? THE SOPRANOS and MAD MEN are similar because they were/are in the middle of their runs as a series, not simply being rebooted or resurrected.

I'm not calling them hiatuses. There are a variety of circumstances in the examples I picked. But all of these were series that did continue (and, yes, I do consider "Doctor Who" a continuation, since the show always had a tradition of recasting the Doctor and bringing in new companions) after a greater length of time than "Mad Men" has been absent.

If you are going to count Doctor Who, then maybe you should also include the update series of Leave it to Beaver, Mission Impossible, and Upstairs Downstairs, all of which picked up on decades-old continuity.

Ahh poor Mole, one of the only "reality" shows I truly loved. Probably best to pretend it ended with Cooper in 2002 but I always wished that show could gain an audience and a greater general appreciation. It really was smart reality television and in the early 2000s when it aired the people involved were truly concerned solely with the game not with getting 15 minutes of fame (a big problem with a few of the people on it when it came back in 2008).

I wouldn't call them cheats per se but I still think a long time off the air for an animated series is a little less impressive compared to live action comedy/drama - less of a time commitment for the actors involved, nobody ages. I'd imagine it was a little easier to pick up Beavis and Butthead a decade+ down the line than something like Arrested Development will be (though here is surely hoping for nothing but the best for the Bluths).

Someone else reminded me of 24 on Twitter, and as with some other items on the list, I guess it comes down to whether you count the TV-movie or not when calculating the gap. Without "Redemption," there were 20 months or so between episodes; with "Redemption," the gap was shorter than "Mad Men" has been away.

Not sure if you would include it, but there were long gaps between the various iterations of the Degrassi shows. A break between the Kids of Degrassi Street and Degrassi Junior High, and then almost a decade between the end of Degrassi High and Degrassi: The New Generation.